Probably, We Americans Shouldn’t Mention The Two Huge Wars Then

Yahoo UK’s “Editor’s Corner,” on British Lance Corporal Joe Glenton refusing to return to fight in Afghanistan:

…Glenton’s rebellion, which could see him sent to jail for two years, has split opinion among the media and the public. Many back Glenton’s defiance, asking ‘Why should he fight for a war he doesn’t believe in?’ while the argument against him points out that he signed up to fight for this country and that he should return to duty.

“I always expected to divide opinion and I understood it would happen,” Glenton told his local newspaper ‘The Press’ in York.

“I welcome the debate and appreciate some people don’t agree with me. But at the end of the day, what I’m doing is what I feel I have to do and the positive thing is that the whole Afghanistan issue is being discussed – there are places in the world where people don’t get the chance to do this.”

Glenton, from the Royal Logistics Corps, also wrote a letter to Gordon Brown explaining why he refuses to return to Afghanistan. In summary the letter states that he feels British soldiers are being used to advance US foreign policy…

Or, as Lance Corporal Glenton unabashedly put matters in that letter to Mr Brown, he believes that: 

…the courage and tenacity of my fellow soldiers has become a tool of American foreign policy…

Even at the risk of sounding impolitic towards an ally, given that opinion is the “primary” (his word) charge he makes — and that the word “tool” has a profoundly serious connotation — this following perhaps needs politely to be pointed out as well.

Because too many seem to think history started with September 11, 2001.  Yet in two earlier far larger conflicts, untold thousands (we don’t know the exact number, of course) of American draftees felt much the same that this British volunteer lance corporal is today willing to assert directly to his prime minister.  Except in reverse: they were dismayed and disgusted with Washington, sure that they were “being used” as “tools” of British foreign policy.

First, in 1917-1918, while being dispatched to fight a war whose reasons bewildered them, perhaps finding themselves getting torpedoed on the Atlantic on British ships on their way to Europe, where many of them would be trained by British soldiers and housed in British camps (where they had to drink tea and no one knew what baseball was), preparing eventually to find themselves machine-gunned in the likes of the Saint-Mihiel salient and the Argonne Forest:

American Army field hospital inside ruins of a church. France, 1918

Then, a generation later, between 1941-1945 — again while being torpedoed in the Atlantic and machine-gunned in France, but particularly when being blown up in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and when struggling to help keep the Japanese from forcing China out of the war, one consequence of which would likely have been a subsequent Japanese invasion of (then British imperial) India from (then Japanese-conquered, British imperial) Burma:

"... troops in Burma stop work briefly to read President Truman's Proclamation of Victory in Europe." May 9, 1945. S/Sgt. Yarnell.

Which is why all need to be very mindful in “this debate.”  This blog’s view is that of most Americans.  They are truly appreciative of Britain’s help in Afghanistan, and the dedication of its servicemen and women there.

Any disagreeing with serving in Afghanistan is one thing.  But politically posturing through trying to appeal to “anti-Americanism” so as to seek some way to justify one’s personal choice may well open up a huge can of worms, and is therefore decidedly something else.  For as we can plainly see, one never knows for sure exactly where such an argument may lead us.